In recent years, social media services and their uses have expanded and increased in popularity, around the world. Many people access various social media services over a network and post numerous types of information over the Internet using the social media services. A social media service is defined herein to mean any social media source such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, YouTube, LinkedIn, or the like. Nowadays, it is common practices for many people to post their personal information, employment history, current employment information, interests, etc. at one or more social media sources (i.e., LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.) so that other people can access and view. As an increasing number of people around the world daily access and use the one or more social media services over a network, the number of data types and amount of available data and information to be mined over the network increase daily.
To obtain various data, including data available at one or more social media sources, over the network, there are many data gathering (or aggregation) tools by third party, such as Whitepages, Intellius, etc. or aggregation tools by social media service providers, such as Facebook, Google+, etc. The data aggregation tools are configured to go out and collect various data over the network about people and make the collected data available in raw format. However, the data aggregation tools do not include sophisticated processing rules and do not apply various business logics to the collected data for processing and future use. Hence, there is a need for techniques or methodologies that can be used in retrieving certain data relating to a person of interest, the data available from one or more social media sources (“social media data”) over a network, and processing the retrieved social media data into useful business information for various applications of the retrieved social media data to business applications for better business results and customer satisfaction.